Jesuit Missionaries in 19th Century Scotland

Dr. James Begg

Their doctrine is an admirable one for the Jesuits. Tell a gardener that he must simply sow seed and the weeds will die of their own accord, and he will smile at your simplicity ; and it is precisely so in the spiritual world. And yet the unscriptural theory to which I have referred has been the main source of all the recent mischief in Scotland. Our wiser and better ancestors were not "dumb dogs that could not bark" (applause), they had their people thoroughly instructed in the controversy with Rome, regarding it as vital to the very existence of a protesting Church. They knew that a faithful minister was a watchman as well as a teacher,—a shepherd to drive away the wolves as well as to lead the sheep to green pastures. (Applause.) But we, imagining ourselves to be wiser than the Word of God, have changed all this; and now that numbers of trained Jesuit emissaries are amongst us, writing and lecturing openly and insidiously against Protestantism in all our cities—now that droves of earnest, bigoted Irish Romanists are in all our towns, and in some of our rural districts, our people are left comparatively unarmed and helpless, as if there were no such text in the Bible as " contend earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints." The matter is a thoroughly practical one. These Romanists are all ready to say plausible things in defence of their system ; and if you have nothing to say in reply, you have little prospect of doing them any good, whilst they are spreading incalculable mischief. Your ignorance and incapacity only hardens them in their delusions ; and instead of the increasing power of truth, we see the melancholy spectacle of the darkness chasing the light even in this land of Sabbaths and Bibles. 

Link (here) to The Protestant magazine and read Dr. James Begg's full discourse against the Catholic Church